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DOD reaches deal to share radio frequency

By Dawn S. Onley

Feb 07, 2003

The Defense Department and IT product vendors have struck an agreement to share a band of radio frequencies without jeopardizing military radar systems that are used to guide warships and provide weather forecasts.

The agreement was reached Jan. 31 and approved by the Federal Communications Commission. It requires vendors to use dynamic frequency selection, a listen-before-transmit detection technology, to avoid interference between wireless computer networks using the IEEE 802.11b standard and military radar systems that operate in the same 5-GHz band, said Badri Younes, DOD's spectrum management director. DOD had wanted the commission to limit the spectrum to Defense use.'